What Legacy-Driven Leadership Looks Like: From Native Forward’s CEO

By Laurel Donnellan, originally published at Forbes.com

Angelique Albert, CEO of Native Forward, is proving that a workplace built on Indigenous values — community, humility, reciprocity — is not a soft culture. It is a winning strategy.

I met Angelique Albert at South by Southwest Education, where she gave the only presentation at the entire conference delivered by a Native American leader. That fact — unremarkable to some, glaring to me — is exactly why I cover compassionate leaders, often people doing crucial work who do not get the coverage they deserve. 

Albert is CEO of Native Forward, the nation’s largest nonprofit scholarship organization for Native American students. Over lunch, she told me a story that is equal parts history lesson, leadership masterclass, and call to action.

A Movement Born From Former Adversaries

Native Forward’s origin story holds its first leadership lesson. In the late 1960s, Bob Bennett, a Oneida man, had spent years inside the Department of the Interior trying to change the system from within — and watching it not budge. At a convening in Santa Fe, tribes gathered to protest the Bureau of Indian Education, and among the protesters was John Rainer, a tribal leader from Taos Pueblo. The two men were, quite literally, on opposite sides.

Then they joined forces. Convinced that lasting change required Native people educated and positioned at the highest levels of influence, they raised their first funding and awarded two scholarships in 1969, working out of a trailer house on the University of Montana campus and, later, Rainer’s garage in Taos.

From those two scholarships, Native Forward has now funded more than 22,000 scholars across all 50 states, reaching over 500 of the 575 federally recognized tribes. When the organization was founded, there were 38 Native lawyers in the country. Today there are more than 2,000 tribal attorneys and 2,200 Native PhDs.

Two leaders who began as adversaries built a legacy by choosing collaboration over conflict. That lesson of difference coming together to create better is needed now more than ever.

A Grandfather Who Was Kidnapped by the US Government 

For Albert, the mission is ancestral. Her grandfather, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, was taken from his family at age five and forced into a boarding school. He ran away repeatedly, was caught repeatedly, and finally, around age ten, caught a train out of state and lived on his own until he was too old to be sent back. Her mother’s generation went to boarding school too — her grandparents chose a Catholic school off the reservation because it was the safer of two painful options.

"My grandparents — those generations — were subjected to federal Indian laws that required them to attend institutions labeled as educational," she told me. “But they did not get access to quality education.”

Albert is the first generation in her family with real access to education, and a first-generation college student who had to figure out applications, financial aid, and graduate school on her own. That experience shapes how Native Forward serves its scholars today — because money alone is not the whole answer.

Native students are raised with humility and community, values that collide with a college system built on self-promotion and self-advocacy. So every Native Forward scholar gets a person — staff who check in, celebrate graduations, and sometimes simply call a financial aid office on a student’s behalf. Albert told me those single phone calls have kept more students enrolled than almost anything else. The results speak plainly: 69% of scholars in Native Forward’s cohort programs complete their undergraduate degrees, compared to roughly 38 to 41 percent for Native students nationally. Graduate scholars complete at an impressive 95%.

The Crisis Behind The Numbers

And yet the gap is widening. In 2010, about 197,000 Native students were enrolled in higher education. By 2023, that number had fallen to roughly 107,000 — an appalling 45% decline. 

Albert is also clear on a point that donors and policymakers urgently need to understand: Native education funding is not a DEI initiative. Native Americans are citizens of sovereign nations, and the federal government holds treaty obligations to tribal communities that predate and operate independently of any diversity program. Yet cuts aimed at DEI are landing on Native students anyway, and they are turning to Native Forward at exactly the moment capacity is stretched. The annual funding gap, Albert estimates, is over $200 million.

According to a recent non-partisan Brookings Institution report, “The federal government has trust and treaty responsibilities to Native American tribes and Native American people, which includes access to quality education. Rooted in legal and political precedent, the federal trust responsibility is a legal obligation in which the U.S. government commits to protect tribal sovereignty, resources, and welfare.”

A Workplace Built On Indigenous Values

What moved me most was how Albert leads. She has built Native Forward’s culture on the tenets of her tribal upbringing: community over individual, reciprocity, humility. All qualities needed but rarely found in all organizations.

Her leadership team works collectively, not hierarchically. Problems are named openly and solved together, and staff meetings rotate facilitators — like a circle, not a pyramid. Employees receive personal leave that honors cultural life, including time for ceremonies like Sundance, and Albert advocated with donors so scholars can step away for cultural obligations without losing their funding.

She learned the value of this culture partly by contrast. Early in her career, at a foundation in Texas, she experienced meetings where people talked over each other to be heard. "In tribal communities, we sit, and we make sure everybody gets a turn to talk before we talk," she said. “Sometimes there are long moments of silence — because you want to give people that extra space.”

One of the organization’s published values is simply "It's personal." Most people assume it means personal to Albert. It doesn't. Her staff defined it together: the work is personal because everything Native Forward does impacts their tribal communities.

She also leads from abundance, not scarcity. Rather than guarding her piece of the philanthropic pie, she partners with organizations others might call competitors, learning from them and teaching them to serve Native communities better. It echoes her founders' story: opposite sides, joined forces.

Authenticity Is The Strategy

When I asked Albert for her core leadership lesson, she did not hesitate: authenticity. As a young professional, she tried to fit in to make a bigger impact. The irony, she said, is that she rose because of the spaces where she was fully herself. Now she is invited into rooms precisely because her voice is unique in them — and when she shows up whole, she gives everyone else permission to do the same.

For any leader feeling pressure to sand down their edges right now, that is not soft advice. It is strategy.

Ten thousand qualified Native scholars will be turned away from funding this year. If you are in a position to help, visit nativeforward.org to donate or partner. And if you organize conferences, look at your speaker roster and think about the debt we owe Native Americans and other voices that need better representation.